I just spent two weeks on vacation in Vietnam, where the old-timers still consider French cars to be the pinnacle of class--and where the French were handed an empire-crippling defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. We're not saying that taking on a basket-case difficult French-car project will be your personal Dien Bien Phu—well, actually, we're saying just that—but perhaps things will work out better for you than they did for Colonel de Castries.

The seller didn't describe <em>anything</em> about his "Pa Quay" Citro&euml;n, instead choosing to copy and paste the first several paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry for the Traction-Avant.

These days, the Citroën DS gets all the attention as the one of the most futuristic, innovative cars in history, but its predecessor, the Traction-Avant, was an equally great leap forward in automotive technology. Unibody construction, front-wheel drive and a beautifully long, low body put the Traction-Avant a couple of decades ahead of its time when it debuted in 1934.

Every serious car freak should be searching for a Traction-Avant for his or her fleet, but solid running examples cost beaucoup bucks. What to do? Why, get yourself a malodorous heap diamond in the rough, of course!

It just so happens that the Hell Garage demons were browsing Craigslist for Citroëns the other day (they love French cars, for obvious reasons), and they discovered this mysterious Traction-Avant in Florida (go here if the listing disappears). What's the price, you ask? One dollar!

In truth, $1 is Craigslist-ese for "I can get a lot more potential buyers for this car if I'm coy about the price," so you'll need to call the seller to find out how much he believes this "Antique Citroën Paquay Spa sport Rally" (whatever that might be) is worth.

As for the car's condition, the seller apparently felt it beneath him to describe anything about his "Pa Quay" Citroën, instead choosing to copy and paste the first several paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry for the Traction-Avant.

According to the photographs, the car suffers from a rust problem somewhere on the spectrum from "no big deal" to "about to break in half." The interior looks reasonably complete, if moldy, and the engine compartment looks to have been untouched since about the time of the Geneva Accords, but we don't know the age of the car because the seller didn't see fit to provide a model year. Still, how hard could it be to restore this fine piece of automotive history?

The 504 sedan was built in overwhelming quantities, but the 504 Cabriolet? Not so much.

It would be cool to have a Traction-Avant, but given its 20-year production run and devoted following, it's really not a particularly rare car. If you're going to throw a decade or two of your life away on a decades-long decline of the French Empire-style struggle with a French car, you need something weird, something that will turn every head when it rolls down the boulevard. Say, a genuine Peugeot 504 cabriolet!

The 504 sedan was built in overwhelming quantities, with production starting in France in 1968 and ending in Nigeria in 2005, but most of us will spend our lives without ever having seen a convertible 504. That's why you should drop everything and buy this 1971 Peugeot 504 cabriolet in New York, with an asking price of just $5,500.

The seller doesn't have much to say about the car: "White with black interior. Extremely rare. Only a handful cars were ever made." What more do you need to know?

The body, she is very rough—apparently a high-school auto-shop class was recruited to do some crude bodywork on it about 15 years ago—and there's no telling what the rust situation is like. The interior looks fairly intact, minus the door panels, and you even get the factory stereo. It has a four-speed and what appears to be a fuel-injection gasoline engine. Does it run? Qui sait?